Visible Falls: Tracing the Fall of Sleep in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

1 Visible Falls: Tracing the Fall of Sleep in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) Monique Rooney (2450 words) This paper explores what I call the being asleep of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018; henceforth referred to as My Year)—a novel that narrates its protagonist’s year of sleeping and retreating from her world. Being asleep names the elusive place of the sleeper when she is asleep, removed from tracks of conscious thought and to a great extent untraceable. In Moshfegh’s novel, being asleep is part of, yet irretrievably separate from, the nameless, first person, fictional narrator who recounts her year of sleep. Touching on theories of sleep—including Jonathan Crary’s work on sleep in our present time of thoroughgoing, digital mediatisation—I think about who or what is a being asleep in the context of non-stop, culture-industrial mediatisation and monitoring of everyday life. This paper asks not only whether the narrator’s being asleep makes her capable of retreating from the mediatised world she inhabits, but also whether she can know where she retreats to or emerges from when she drifts or falls to sleep. With reference to Jacqueline Rose’s reading of sleep as a dark pathway to artistic invention, moreover, it explores the idea that it is through the untraceable tracks of being asleep that Moshfegh’s narrator moves toward creative affirmation of her world. Moshfegh’s My Year takes a particular angle on questions of ontology and culture-industrial mediation. Chronicling a year in the life of its narrator, the novel’s Year begins sometime in 2000 and ends just after September 11, 2001. At the beginning of this year especially, the narrator enjoys extensive sleeps thanks to sleep medication that she has deceptively 2 procured from a psychiatrist—the humorously named Dr Tuttle. The latter prescribes heavier and heavier doses of sleep medication that send the narrator into long sleeps in her NYC apartment, which she rarely leaves except for daily visits to a local Bodega for coffee. She occasionally sees her on-again, off-again boyfriend Trevor and receives regular visits from her only friend, Reva, whose own troubles and words of advice the narrator barely tolerates. Otherwise, when awake, she absorbs herself in repeat viewings of a selection of video-rental movies starring her favourite actors, Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg. DIGITAL-ERA MEDIATION Rejecting boyfriend Trevor’s gift of a DVD-player, the narrator’s preference for technology on the brink of obsolescence (such as her VCR) is cognate with her desire for sleep as a retreat from the world. The narrator’s preference for pre-digital technology occasions the novel’s setting at the cusp of the new millennium, the threshold of our current situation of 24/7 technological mediation. Moshfegh has stated in interview that she would not have been able to set the novel in the year of its publication (2018), by which time digital devices are everywhere, on everyone’s person, all of the time, making it more difficult to anonymously retreat into hibernation in the ways in which My Year’s narrator temporarily does. Along with the quotidian details of her year (dosing heavier-thanprescribed medication, sleeping, watching videos, the daily Bodega visits), the narrator recounts various aspects of her past and present—during her college years and subsequent time working in an art gallery as well as memories of childhood and early adolescence. Her parents having died, the narrator (their only child) is the inheritor of a sizeable estate, making her independently wealthy and able to live for a time without other income. 3 The reader learns that her father was an academic who was detached and secretive. The narrator’s mother, a long-term alcoholic also addicted to Valium, had never worked. Far from being bitter about this upbringing, the narrator appears to excuse her mother in particular, including such negligent-bordering-on-abuse moments when (as reported by her mother) Valium had been crushed into a bottle of milk in order to stop the infant narrator from crying. Far from blaming her mother, the narrator fondly recalls the times when, allowed to skip school, she would spend all day with her mother in the latter’s king size bed, where the two watched television in between dozes. At such moments, the novel places together its narrator’s love of sleep with the desire to be near an unmoving and unmoved mother—one not only intoxicated and stoned but also willing to pacify her daughter with medication. The novel’s drive toward sleep is inextricably tied to a desire to return to the maternal bed and body. The novel thus evokes sleep as both infantile regression and desire for primordial stasis—the latter being a stoniness that both precedes and succeeds life as we know it. In addition, particularly through passages in which the narrator recounts her own delinquency when working as a “gallery girl” in New York City’s fashionable lower-east side, sleep offers the narrator a retreat from the ideological imperatives of culture-industrial production and consumption at large. The narrator scathingly notes how she only got the job because of her movie-star looks and her “amazing wardrobe”. The novel evokes a celebrity-obsessed scene defined not so much by cultivation of artistic creativity as by a social cachet and cultural distinction monitored from within by its privileged artists, curators, collectors and buyers. Stealing naps on the job, the narrator is eventually caught and fired. Her severe judgement of the conformism and mindless mechanisation of this artworld scene that she is pleased to leave behind is 4 crystallised when she refers to its productions as “canned countercultural crap”. The novel’s negative view of the commercial artworld can to a certain extent be understood as a proxy for author Moshfegh’s view of the book industry to which she herself has now contributed several prize-winning novels and short story collections. In interview with Luke B. Goebel, Moshfegh distances her own writing from what she enigmatically refers to as the “institutionalization of everything”—implying that the cultureindustrialisation of everyday life is “whitewashing people’s imaginations” and producing uniformity. Elsewhere, Moshfegh also speaks about the fetish for publishing, purely for status reasons, in such high-end venues as Paris Review, Granta, The New Yorker, Vice etc. Both Moshfegh and her fictional creation might thus be accused of a reverse snobbery that borders on cynicism about the industry of others. However, Moshfegh’s tirades against the mechanising tendencies of commercial production seem reversed when she notes in interview that she relied on a “how-to-manual” to write her first, award-winning novel Eileen (see Goebel). Displaying a self-reflexive critical eye for both authorial and fictional aesthetic judgements, My Year exercises narrative contradictions and tensions primarily through the relationship between the narrator and her only female friend, Reva. Beset by her own troubles— she is dating a married man and her mother is dying of cancer—Reva frequently visits the narrator’s apartment during the year of sleep to complain about her problems. Reva’s troubles generally appear to fall on unsympathetic ears, with the first person narrative repeatedly making explicit that the narrator barely tolerates Reva: she repeatedly criticises Reva’s doling out of pieces of Oprah-style advice as if these are revelations, while condescendingly rejecting Reva’s offer to lend her a CD set of self- 5 help guidance material. This attitude to Reva is, however, overturned by the narrative’s end, with its incorporation of being asleep proving central to the reversal that takes place. BEING ASLEEP In the light of its late-90s/millennial setting, its critique of cultureindustrial homogeneity and its thematisation of resistance to digital-era technologies, Moshfegh’s book can be understood as a response to the farreaching mediatised and culture-industrialised present of what Jonathan Crary, Bernard Stiegler and others have identified as a new stage of capitalism marked by accelerated, global production and consumption, intensive tech-industrial mediatisation and biometric surveillance of everyday life. Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep (2013) explores the accelerated pace and intrusive capacities of our current, technologised environment, in which we are constantly connected to digitally-networked streams of production and consumption that continue around the clock, without rest, 24/7. The rise since the late 1990s of vertically-integrated models of governance (exemplified by Microsoft and Google) allowing for intensified, tech-industrial management of individual behaviour is exemplified, for Crary, by Google’s marketing strategy that deploys “eye-tracking” technology to measure the number, and micro-movements of, eyes looking at a screen at any one moment. What is at stake here? For Crary, this situation threatens “diurnal”, “phasic” and “seasonal” time, replacing cyclical time with the homogenous “no time” of late stage capitalism. This situation, Crary writes, is deeply affecting who we are, how we live, what it means to think and, ultimately, what it means to be human. Corroding the spatial and temporal conditions under which individuals think and their creativity thrives, late stage 6 capitalist mediatisation encroaches on aspects of everyday life at a microscalar level to the extent that even sleep has become vulnerable. For Bernard Stiegler, this situation threatens no less than the loss of “subjective identity” and “singularity.” The dominance of machine-learned systems that track, aggregate and feed back data about our attention to information is fuelling the “disastrous disappearance of individual participation and creativity in the making of symbols we all exchange and share” (Stiegler in Crary 51). What is sleep or, more to the point, what is the novel of sleep in the context of a 24/7 attention economy corroding both individual subjectivity and cyclical/diurnal time? Jean-Luc Nancy writes in his book The Fall of Sleep (2007) about the capacity of sleep to defy every aspect of waking life, including logics of accumulation, extraction and ownership structuring capitalism. Nancy writes that sleep leaves us nothing to take or keep—it is a suspended state, one that is permanently removed from the waking self. “I sleep and this I that sleeps can no more say it sleeps than it could say that it is dead” (Nancy 5). In an essay about the meaning of sleep in the Interpretation of Dreams, Jacqueline Rose argues that sleep is the foundational yet shadowy and unresolved area of Freud’s work on dreams and the unconscious. Fascinated by Freud’s oblique reference to sleep in terms of the “inner processes of dreaming” that “lead us only into the dark,” Rose posits sleep in Freud as less a metaphor than a pathway into darkness that she then connects to a moment in the Interpretation of Dreams in which Freud recounts a vision in which a mother shrouds a child in order order to protect its eyes from exposure to trauma. Further, Rose compares these “inner processes” to Proust’s understanding of sleep as an inwardlooking eye, which is somewhat akin to Nancy’s poetic evocation of sleep as a “nightfall” of the body. For Proust, as Rose shows, sleep is a place in which 7 one is obliquely attuned to the “dark current of our blood” and the “translucent depths of … mysteriously lighted viscera.” Existing at the propulsive threshold of the organic body, sleep is for Proust “the only source of invention. We all become artists in the process of transforming and reinventing sleep” (Rose 120). REVA (REVEALING) FALLS With a view to concepts of sleep as bodily “nightfall” (Nancy)—and as both a propulsive oblivion and source of invention (Proust)—I return to My Year and the point to which the narrative takes its being asleep. As the story continues, the narrator comes up against traces not of her sleeping self so much as her heavily medicated, stoned-into-sleep self. In November 2000 of My Year’s year, things begin to change. After taking a newly prescribed drug with the fictional name Infermiterol, the narrator blacks out, waking some days later to find traces of activity during sleep. Numbers for items spent on credit card bills or voicemail responses to appointments show she has indeed left her apartment to shop, eat extravagantly and club. Against her dislike for digital-media and social interaction, the narrator also finds evidence of somnambulant participation in internet chat rooms where she has flirted with men and received pictures of their genitalia. As the novel travels deeper into its sleeper’s sleep-odyssey, this somnambulance becomes more vigorous and complicated, particularly when it begins to involve Reva, the friend she ostensibly dislikes, and when the narrator learns that she has acted in conflict with her waking intentions, thoughts and propensities. Following the death of Reva’s mother, about which event the narrator is, when awake, neutral at best, the narrator again takes Infermiterol before blacking out. She wakes a day or so later to find herself on the train to Long 8 Island where she has arranged, while on Infermiterol, to stay with Reva at her family’s home and accompany her to her mother’s funeral. Thus, the narrator’s determination to be isolated has been counteracted during her sleeping hours by her being asleep, which has led her to comfort Reva on the telephone and then seek her out in person. Later, having reluctantly attended Reva’s mother’s funeral, the narrator lies in the bed that Reva had slept-in as a child. The narrator recounts how she: … woke up briefly to the sound of the faucet running and Reva retching in the bathroom. It was a rhythmic, violent song—throat grunts punctuated with splats and splashes. When she had finished, she flushed three times, turned off the faucet and went back up the stairs. I lay awake until I thought an appropriate amount of time had passed. I didn’t want Reva to think I’d been listening to her vomit. My blind eye was the one real comfort I felt I could give her (My Year 167). As the narrator makes clear, turning a “blind eye” to Reva is a way of offering comfort, of protecting her, much as Freud’s vision-mother shrouds her child’s eyes from exposure to harm. “My blind eye” is also eponymous, obliquely referring us from Reva back to the novel’s narrator and her year of turning a blind eye to the world. By the end of the novel, the narrator takes her sleep-odyssey much further, contracting an artist, Ping Xi, to imprison her in her own apartment and to intermittently film her while she is blacked-out on Infermiterol. Viewing this as no less than an opportunity for rebirth and a quest for a “new spirit,” the narrator is however disappointed by the end product. Finally viewing Ping Xi’s videos in a show he titles “Large-Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman,” the narrator describes a figure who looks alien to her. The videoed images are “not what 9 I’d remembered imagining from my days with Ping Xi” (283). This “not what I’d remembered imagining” touches on the “blind eye” that the narrator turns on the “violent song” of Reva’s retchings, grunts and splashes. The being asleep cannot adequately be traced, even if the oblivious and propulsive currents of that experience can be imagined.